Craig Harrison - The Quiet Earth

She lies in a twist on the road, barefoot, one leg splayed out awkwardly, head facing up, blood starting from long grazes on her outstretched arms. She is a Polynesian, young, mid-twenties, skin a soft caramel brown, hair in long jet-black tendrils, one strand across her mouth. She’s breathing. Unconscious. Her face looks merely asleep.

I kneel by her side, reach out, draw back the hair from her mouth. Suddenly blood runs from her nose, down the sides of her face. Api slumps opposite, his eyes staring frantically; he is rubbing the palms of his hands in convulsive movements on his jeans, cursing; No, oh God, no, nothing I could do, she just ran out, I couldn’t—Jesus, what can we do—

He drags a handkerchief out and goes to dab at the blood on her face. I make a movement to stop him.

‘Careful. Don’t move her.’

He glares at me. I begin to take off my parka, to cover her. He takes off his jacket, too.

‘Get rugs from the cars, coats, anything.’ I tell him. He sprints off to ransack the stationary cars whilst I look after her as best I can. The blood has gone very dark and congealed. I gently tip her head back, feeling her skull. Then I draw her jaw down to open her mouth. She might choke on the blood. Her white teeth part.

Api comes back with rugs. He makes a pillow for her head but I motion him away. We cover her.

‘Drive back and get an ambulance from the hospital,’ I say. He looks at the car vacantly.

‘I just—I never saw her, she just came out—’

‘Her leg might be broken. I think she’s got concussion. We can’t take her in the car—’ He stands, starts to run, comes back.

‘You go. I’ll stay with her.’

‘No. You drive. Get an ambulance. There’ll be first-aid kits and stretchers in it.’

He runs to the car, climbs in, crashes the gears and drives off towards the city, a grind of metal as he pulls away from the dividing rail. The tyres screech. The blue haze of burned rubber blows away. The car noise fades.

I look down. She’s still breathing regularly but her face has gone the white of candle wax and the bloodstains look very dark. I’m shivering, going into shock myself. I walk to the dividing rail with its dented impact scar and smear of red paint; leaning over it I retch and vomit, barking out acid remnants of the tinned fruit I ate for breakfast. Then I stumble across to the woman and kneel by her, helpless.

He’s right. What can we do?

Where did she come from? The car is an old white Cortina, heavily rusted. It seemed as if she was hiding behind it; as if she ran out at the last moment.

She moves slightly, making a small whimpering sound; her head lolls sideways. There are too many rugs and coats on her. I carefully lift my parka from her feet and replace it with a tartan rug Api brought from the old car. She is barefoot. About eight metres away there is a sandal on the wet road. I put my parka on again, the gun heavy in the pocket.

Come on, Api. Hurry. Come on, man.

I rub my hands on my arms. It does seem cold now. The sky has gone darker. It might rain again.

Where has she been the last three weeks? I stare at her wax face. She looks more like an Islander than a Maori. Samoan, perhaps. Not that I could really tell. From Auckland? Not from here, any of these suburbs. We checked them all, thoroughly. We drove for miles, and ages. We checked everywhere.

She moves again. I think she will die. I sit on the wet concrete and hold her hand. The knuckles are grazed. The hand is not very warm; but soft, and limp.

I look round. The emptiness seems to expand into an even vaster nothing, grey-blank, taking some part of my mind to a distance and letting me see the scene separately. The sky and hills are stuck together. The horizon has vanished. We are two figures on a great concrete arena, a stage without edges. How could we have done this? How?

Don’t die. I massage the hand gently. I lean closer to her face and whisper, you mustn’t die. You’ll be alright now.

There are no witnesses.

Nobody sees.

Or hears.

She lies in the bed at the hotel where we have so carefully placed her; unconscious, all night, so not in pain, not knowing how much she should be in pain. In the evening we light candles, but Apirana goes down then and starts the generator for the electric lights. The candles seem wrong. Neither of us speaks much. We watch her intently. If our will to make her live counted for anything she would be awake. But it doesn’t, and she is not. She becomes the centre of everything; broken, silent. Again, the mystery has wrenched itself into a new shape. It has contracted and become more urgent, and at the same time expanded, seizing new areas.

We have brought her to the hotel because we have food and power here; these rooms are on the first floor. But we argue at the far end of the room, away from her, in low voices, urgently. He wants to take her to the hospital for an X-ray. I convince him we couldn’t operate the machine, even with power; we don’t know how. He insists I drive there to get drugs. I do so, leaving him sitting by her, shocked and pale. She’s got to be alright, he says.

At the hospital I collect penicillin, an oxygen cylinder and mask, morphine, sleeping tablets, hypodermics, valium and librium, a nitrous oxide cylinder and some chloroform and antiseptics. Back at the hotel I again try to detect if she has broken her legs; the left leg below the knee looks swollen, but there is no apparent fracture. She may have internal injuries, or broken ribs. There is bad bruising. Perhaps we only hit her a glancing blow. But when she was thrown onto the concrete, she may have fractured her skull. Even if we knew that, what could we do?

We clean the blood from her closed face, bathe her arms and knee with warm water and antiseptic, and apply bandages.

Neither of us can sleep. We take it in turns to try. I leave Apirana watching over her, the light dimmed to a small glowing patch. He smoothes the hair back from her forehead with his big hand, resting his hand lightly on her forehead, and when I lie down in the next room I can hear him whispering to her.

An hour later he comes through the connecting door into the room where I am staring at the ceiling and says we should have tried to find out her name by searching the car. If we know her name it may help.

I say there is no point going out there now, in the dark, it will be light in five or six hours.

He says he will go when it’s light. He thinks she is Samoan. There is a long silence after he returns to her bedside. Then I hear his voice again but in a different tone; still low, yet more decisive and speaking as if somebody is listening to him. I get up and walk to the door and look in. He is kneeling by the bed with his head buried in the Bible. I watch for a moment and then go and lie down again. At some point I fall half-asleep to the pulse in my skull of a windscreen wiper beating away bits of blood on glass.

At dawn he goes out to search the car on the motorway. I sit by the woman. Her breathing is shallow and regular. A new colour has gradually come to the surface of her skin, a translucent light gold. She looks peaceful and beautiful with the composed expression of someone who is settled down ready for an immense journey. At the same time I know this to be a deception, a collection of mere surface effects. Her metabolism is deceiving itself. As I watch her I see the change begin to take place within half an hour. It is as if the message passed from one level to another, and the survival mechanisms of the inner chains of command realised what was happening and began to resist. The same old sequence; involuntary, uninterested in whether the main process might be good, bad, peaceful, beautiful, or anything else; just the spasmodic struggle for survival at any cost. A restlessness and a disturbance in the steady rhythm of the breathing, barely noticeable at first, is the start of the change. I wonder why I have to watch this. Like any war, because in every sense that is what it is, it will be useless and frightening; it will make nothing but pain. I have to sit now and see it beginning. The map of her face is gradually altered; new lines are drawn. The peace is at first only faintly disturbed. Then it disappears, seeming so unnatural and fragile, not at all a normal condition but an irrelevance.